We want to talk about various conventions that relate to the presentation of written work, particularly the kind of work produced by university students. Several of these points are bound to come up in any essay you write; it is, therefore, well worth checking through the list to see if you are presenting your work in an appropriate way. It is just this kind of attention to detail that surreptitiously picks up more marks for you in an essay but also helps you to develop a polished and professional approach to written work.
1. Spacing work
A word-processed essay should always be double-spaced (set your word-processor to print on every other line). Generous spacing makes your essay easier to read, and leaves room for the marker to write in comments. The main secret of typing essays is always to allow plenty of space on the page: sensible margins, double-spacing, a reasonably large font or type-face (we suggest not smaller than 11 point text). Think of the needs of your reader; your reader wants to be presented with something that is easy on the eye, and as such easy to read.
Your aim in word-processing (or, more rarely these days, typing) an essay is to present an impression of your competence, and the look of your work is part and parcel of this overall impression. Remember that mistakes in spelling and punctuation may be far more apparent, and glaring, in a printed essay than they are in a hand-written essay. You should also remember, therefore, that it is your responsibility to proof-read and spell-check your essay for errors. Don’t make the mistake of thinking just because you have spent a lot of time on your choice of fonts that the marker will ignore your errors. The very opposite: he or she will see that you have put trivial things before important matters. So, the lesson is: well-presented work is a must -and that includes reading it through for mistakes. A useful tip is to leave the work for a while after it is finished and then to check the print-out (it’s virtually impossible to check work as a whole on the screen). This, of course, implies that you haven’t left everything until the last minute. Markers can always spot a script that has been dashed off just before the deadline: it’s invariably got mistakes in the first paragraph, and sometimes in the title, too.
2. Titles
At school most people are taught to put all titles in single inverted commas (e.g. ‘Hamlet’). At university and more generally in publishing, however, the accepted academic convention is that book titles are underlined or put in italics (e.g. Hamlet or Hamlet). Single inverted commas, by contrast, indicate names of poems, or short stories, or passage titles that appear in other books. We would, therefore, write ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ for a poem, but The Waste Land if the poem has been published on its own, as a book under such a title, the rule, therefore, is that titles are underlined or italicized, but you put single inverted commas, or quotation marks, around the titles of works that are a part of other works. We should add that underlining in an essay represents italics. These days most students can word-process their essays and many opt for italics instead of underlining. But in exams, of course, it is not possible to do this, and underlining becomes the only method available. In general, it is probably best to keep to underlining both in essays and examinations so that you have a consistent system to employ. In preparing this book, for example, everything that is now in italics was originally underlined; this told the printer where to employ italics. It is possibly worth explaining that many of the conventions used in academic work relate to the needs of publishers to ensure the standard presentation of their books. Almost every publisher has its own ‘house style’ for layout, In a sense, what we are recommending is a version of the standard academic house style, where you use the signals and signs that belong to formal writing.